If police stopped shooting at moving vehicles, a 6-year-old could still be alive

On Tuesday night, a 6-year-old boy, Jeremy Mardis, became the youngest person killed in an American police-involved shootings in years. He was just a first grader at Lafarue Elementary School in Effie, La. Until Jeremy's death, Tamir Rice, of Cleveland, Ohio, had been the youngest known person killed by police.

Yes, it's wrong to be in a chase with police. That much is rather obvious. However, shooting into moving vehicles has actually been banned for years by many police departments all over the country, including the NYPD, for reasons just like this. In a special report from The Guardian on the lethal dangers of police shooting into moving vehicles, it was made abundantly clear why federal guidelines advise officers against such actions. As of September, at least 30 Americans had been shot and killed by police while in vehicles this year. Surely the number has increased in the subsequent months.

Crime is a dependent variable in the world. It has always existed and will always exist. How our law enforcement chooses to respond to those crimes, though, can and should evolve.

I simply refuse to believe that the only way police could have disabled this vehicle was to fire bullets into it. If they had any knowledge that this sweet little boy was in the vehicle, they should've attempted to move heaven and earth to prevent such a shooting. If it took all night long to do so, it would've been worth it.

While we don't yet know what warrant they were attempting to serve his father, it's hard to imagine how it was worth the life of little Jeremy Mardis.

So far, in 2015, police in our country have killed an astounding 1,005 people and are on pace to significantly surpass the 2014 record of 1,100.